Computer aided telephony systems are well known within the art. Such systems typically include a server which runs a voice application and a digital trunk processor to provide high quality computer aided telephony functions. The telephony functions include, for example, a digital trunk adapter and E1/T1 trunk interface card, DTMF detection or generation resources, text-to-speech resources, facsimile resources and voice recognition resources.
Typically a voice application running at the server, in response to an incoming call, requires access to a number of the above computer aided telephony resources. Normally access is provided to such call processing resources via a time division multiplexed (TDM) bus such as a SONET bus. However, it is sometimes the case that the server either does not provide call processing hardware resources such as voice processing digital signal processors and the like, or does not have access to a TDM bus such as hardware and software implementing such a SONET bus. In those circumstances, it is not possible to implement a computer aided telephony system effectively.
It is an object of the present invention at least to mitigate some of the problems of the prior art.